david hubbard
Safety above all — air and ground
BUSRide Publisher / Editor in Chief Steve Kane steve@busride.com Associate Publisher Sali Williams swilliams@busride.com
I talked to Steve Predmore shortly after he joined MV Transportation, Dallas, TX, as senior vice president of Safety. The fact that he was previously the chief safety officer for JetBlue intrigued me, as I consider the airlines industry the gold standard of transportation safety. I was curious to hear the contrasts and comparisons on his descent from air to ground, where the rubber meets the road. Predmore connected the dots in an interesting journey that has led him from his doctoral studies in human performance at the University of Texas to his work with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the move from planes to buses.
ally well, while others in the same scenario not so well. That led me into aviation, where the cockpit is a great laboratory. From there I worked three years for the NTSB, which, of course is multi-modal, and then with the airline for the last 20 years.
You’ve come from 35,000 feet to ground level. What’s that like?
Safety, of course, is the common denominator in every operation and function. MV Transportation will always provide the best available tools and to protect our employees, and the drivers and technicians out there taking care of the customers. At the same time we need to be sensitive to the characteristics of each agency, and how its particular environmental challenges differ from the next.
Aviation is certainly an industry I was proud to serve for what all it has accomplished over the years. But by no means has anyone in the airlines ever assumed we had it all figured out, or that we did it any better than other modes. Each industry as its own set of challenges and safety parameters. As a safety director I had responsibilities for airport and facilities operations, a diverse workforce and various types of vehicles and equipment. There are plenty of similarities between ground and air operations in those respects. While I have only been at my new position a very short time, one sharp contrast I have experienced is the degree of regulation on aviation. Flight operations in particular are so highly regulated that all the major carriers appear very similar where they are operating the same types of planes. From that standpoint, surface bus transit from agency to agency seems much less regulated and more variable than I am used to seeing.
How did you find your way into transportation safety? As a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in psychology, my interest was small group dynamics. I was particularly interested in why teams in certain environments perform re-
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What is your early assessment of public transit?
Overall I think all transportation modes throughout the U.S. are very safe. I would not hesitate to put my family on an MV transit bus, or any one of our competitors for that matter. It is a safe industry, but we always want to be safer tomorrow than we are today.
How will you approach safety within MV Transportation?
Have you set any immediate goals for your new position? Going forward I am hoping to apply much of the available technology more proactively as opposed to crisis management; to use it in a more preventative fashion. Our Drive Cam system being deployed on 90 percent of the vehicles throughout our client agencies is a good example. We can rely on its potential for training, rather than reacting and analyzing events after the fact. I look forward to working on ways we can raise the bar for safety this industry.
How do we do that? We have a saying in the airlines that there is no accident for the individual airline, only for the industry. I would like see the same philosophy apply for all bus operations. If we are willfully sharing information, operator to operator, on the hazards and the risks, we will all be better advised and able to do our jobs better and safer.
Editor David Hubbard david@busride.com Assistant Editor Richard Tackett rtackett@busride.com Director of Sales Jennifer Owens jowens@busride.com Account Executive Maria Galioto mgalioto@busride.com Production Director Valerie Valtierra valerie@busride.com Art Director Dominic Salerno dsalerno@busride.com Contributing Writers Doug Jack, Matthew A. Daecher, Christopher Ferrone
BUS industry SAFETY council
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Vol. 48 No. 10 Vice President Operations Valerie Valtierra
Accountant Fred Valdez
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